


Great Men Do Poor Angels Make

by quiettewandering



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Compliant, Castiel/Dean Winchester UST, Fallen Angels, Homeless Castiel, Human Castiel, Human Castiel in the Bunker, M/M, Metatron Being a Dick, Pining Castiel, Pining Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, but at the same time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-13 02:32:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7135031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiettewandering/pseuds/quiettewandering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Returning to the bunker 5 months since Dean kicked him out, Cas is graceless and won't tell the Winchester brothers what happened during his time away. Dean grapples between his guilt for rejecting Cas (who he is developing more-than-brotherly feelings for) and his relentless need to protect Sam. Meanwhile, strange sightings of unexplained supernatural beings call to something larger and darker. As Cas falls further into his depression and sleepless nights wrestling with past demons, the horrors in the world around them grows, and it soon becomes apparent that something very wrong is happening to the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For clarification: I am taking all the things that happened in canon up until Cas gets kicked out of the bunker by Dean. In this canon-divergent version, Dean puts his big-boy pants on and tells Sam that Gadreel is in his body; Sam expels him; recovers the rest of the way naturally; then Cas is free to return to the bunker. (Kevin and his mom reunited magically living happily ever after and all that prophet crap just went out the window because Metatron abolished it in Heaven without killing off Kevin because Kevin deserves better) 
> 
> I'll be posting every Wednesday, because hump day is practically a holiday.

As he stands among the bodies, mutilated and desecrated, sprawled black wings cradled underneath each of them, Castiel knows this was never his intention. He never meant to kill. To murder. His only intention, his only want, was to protect Dean.

He stares down at his angel blade, black with blood. His grace is searing hotly through his chest, on a confused high after killing so many brethren in an unfamiliarly brutal method. He can feel it growing thick with grief, heavy with the stain of murder. If he were still human, he knows undoubtedly that his hands would be shaking. 

Footsteps clatter behind him, the sound skidding across the wide, open room. He turns to face the angel before him. Castiel can feel the angel’s grace violently thrumming toward him.

“I just wanted to protect Dean,” he whispers.

It’s the last thing he says before the angel casually cuts his hand through the air. Castiel is aware of his body slamming against the wall, sharp, burning pain, his grace so scalding that he feels a great rip through his chest and then--

Nothing.

***

**Months later**

Dean sees the first of them after a hunt.

The Impala is cruising at a safe and sensible speed of 80 mph down a gravelly county road, trees flashing by on the side of the dark road within the scope of the car’s headlights. He’s blasting his Back in Black cassette at an obnoxiously loud volume. Sam, who had taken a blow to the shoulder and is fiercely pretending that it does not hurt at all, is drifting through sleep and consciousness in the passenger seat next to him. Dean is the last to admit it, but he’s no more awake than his brother; his eyelids droop heavier than usual, neck dropping flirtatiously to connect with his chest in a quiet snooze.

He attempts to distract himself by checking on his ex-angel in the backseat. Also asleep. These bastards, Dean thinks. Can’t even give the driver decent conversation after--

His eyes catch the movement, in the middle of the road as his car’s headlights speed up to the spot. He bites out a curse--slams the brake--turns the wheels into a skidding stop.

Sam the gargantuan wakes immediately, making as if to stand and slamming his head against the roof of the Impala. “Dean, what the actual _fuck_ \--”

Cas raises his head, drooping like a late summer sunflower, blinking rapidly as he surveys his surroundings blearily.

Dean huffs a shaky breath. _Yup, I’m with the cream of the crop right here._ “Saw somethin,’” he barks, leaning forward and squinting into the road. The dust was slowly settling to reveal an empty space where he had seen them not two seconds earlier.

“What, Dean, what did you see,” asks his impatient brother, rubbing his head.

“Something like… sticks!”

Sam looks at him incredulously. “Sticks in a _road?_ Cause that’s….weird?”

“No, like, black sticks or somethin’--”

Cas carefully puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Dean, are you ill?” he asks very seriously.

“No, Cas, ugh goddamnit I saw--these, like--stick people!”

Sam looks to the road, his mouth in a tight line. Dean recognizes that he is trying very hard not to laugh. “Stick… people.”

“Well, yeah!” Dean cries, throwing his hands in the air. He smacks his wrist against the window and curses. “I saw stick people.”

They had been tall. Thin. Almost impossible to see, their shadows casting an optical illusion in the headlights. But they were undeniably there, with their smushed-in skinny heads, faceless faces, spindly arms and legs. There were three of them, standing at an angle, almost like the Impala had caught them by surprise and they were turning to face it.

Then, nothing.

“Let’s get back to the bunker,” Sam says carefully to break the tense silence. “I can look into any possible... stick people occurrences around here.”

Muttering curses, Dean violently switches gears and punches the gas pedal, pointing the car in the direction of home.

 

Having an ex-angel in the bunker is strange for Dean. Having an ex-angel on hunts with them is stranger. Having an ex-angel snuggled up into a contented ball on an armchair in the bunker’s library with a large leather-bound book against his knees is the strangest of all _._ He sees Cas as he passes the library from the kitchen, having snuck in for a midnight slice of pie leftover from the diner they stopped at earlier. Dean hesitates only briefly, then strides toward Cas, hands in his pockets and his face lit up in a winning grin. “Hey, Cas.”

Cas raises his eyes and smiles. “Hello, Dean.”

Dean pulls up a chair in front of Cas, wincing when it noisily scrapes against the floor. “So, I was thinking… about your grace. We’ve been doing these small hunts, but Sammy and I are still looking for where Metatron may have stashed it--”

Cas shakes his head. “No, Dean, it’s all right.”

He pauses, blinking, holding up his hands. “I’m sorry, run that by me again? It’s all _right?_ ”

“Yes.” Cas sighs, stretching his legs in front of him and elongating his back. “Dean, I had a lot of time to think during my homeless enlightenment period.”

Dean pinches his nose. “Cas… Charlie called it that. It doesn’t mean you _actually_ call it that.”

“All right, then what should I call it?”

“Just say you were homeless.”

“That doesn’t sound any more pleasant.”

“Can you get to the damn point?”

Cas considers his folded hands, picking at his long nails. They obviously haven’t been cut in a while. Dean thinks absentmindedly that someone should remind Cas that he needs to pay attention to self-care shit like that. “Dean, I realize I am not much help to you and Sam without my grace. Without my grace I cannot heal, teleport, find the Baja Blasts that Taco Bell has ceased to sell in which you enjoy so much--”

Dean sighs and nods. “That there is the biggest shame.”

“--but I realize now that my attempts to help do more harm than good. Heaven needs help from another source more capable than I.”

Dean bends forward, elbows resting on knees, hands clasped. “Cas, let me let you in on a little secret: everyone makes mistakes. Even angels. You can’t just _give up_ when the going gets tough.”

“I’m not giving up, Dean, merely stepping aside,” Cas says with a serene smile. “There are angels in my garrison that have been in contact with me, both when I was on the road and now that I am back here. Ones that will lead the charge on Heaven, and know better than I about what to do when they take it back. I will help as I am able, but not as an angel.”

He knows that Cas hasn’t been himself since returning to the bunker. He knows that something in the ex-angel switched internally, changed from the Cas that always fought hard to make things right for his brothers and sisters to become a more subdued, unmotivated... _human_. Dean doesn’t know if he is comfortable with the change. “Cas… what happened to you out there?”

Cas’s eyes harden a shade, a warning for Dean to not pry. “I merely understood my place. My mission is to serve the angels in their battle to take back Heaven, without making myself a danger to others. In the meantime, my place is also with you and Sam, hunting as I am able.”

“Okay, Cas. If that makes you happy,” says Dean, recognizing the dismissive tone in Cas’s voice. This conversation is, for now, done.

“It does.”

Nodding, Dean looks down at his scuffed boots and can’t push it back when a smile tugs at his lips. “Just, don’t eat all my Oreos again, okay dude?”

Cas huffs out a laugh. “I promise, Dean.”

Raising his eyes to look at his friend, Dean sees the healthy glow in Cas’s cheeks, which were much less gaunt than when Dean saw him for the first time since kicking him out of the bunker. The blue eyes that are now gentle and trusting, unlike the shuttered, closed-off look they had before. After spending a few weeks in the bunker, Cas already seems to have reshaped his muscle tone, eat to his stomach’s fill to bulk his too-slender frame.

It was a huge improvement from how Dean found him in the warehouse, after Cas had killed the angels and Sammy was safe. Dean remembers seeing Cas’s twisted form, unnaturally still on the ground, so much blood that it seemed as though the ground itself was leeching it from Castiel’s body--

No. Dean told himself weeks ago he would stop thinking about that day. Stop thinking about the whole five months that Cas was gone, after Dean had left him on the back doorstep of the bunker saying see you never friend, good luck out there. Stop thinking about the sleepless nights where Dean tore his hair out just from the sheer guilt that Cas could be wheezing out his last breath in a cold ditch somewhere, because Dean was apparently incapable of taking care of Cas while also keeping his own brother alive. Stop thinking about how that part of Cas’s past is always going to be a blank page to Dean, because Cas will always refuse to talk to him about what happened. Cas hadn't even acted angry at Dean for kicking him out, after he explained the situation; Cas grasped his arm, saying that he knows Dean had his reasons and he bears no resentment. Dean knew better than to know this was the truth; but he didn't pry. So he doesn't think about that either.

Instead he thinks about how bright and healthy Cas’s baby blues are, how Cas had eaten three portions of Dean’s make-it-as-simple-and-fast-as-you-can-before-driving-out-to-a-hunt-scrambled eggs (two more portions than usual mornings), how his friend slowly is learning how to fully smile again. Dean is happier when he thinks of these things.

“Dean…”

He blinks, landing back in reality. “Yeah, Cas?”

“Did you really see stick people on the road?”

He scrubs a hand over his face, his fingernails leaving white trails down his skin. “Yeah, Cas, I did, but I don’t know what the hell it meant.”

Cas nods seriously, frowning down at his book. “Maybe it’s best that we find out.”

***

**5 months previous**

_Cas, buddy... you can’t stay._

 

Castiel wasn’t used to his emotions. As an angel, he had them, but they were simply...subdued. Sheltered behind a wall so that he didn’t feel the full extent of them. Now, as a human, they crashed over him in throbbing waves.

His stunt as God ( _the screams of people as he burnt cults, churches that proclaimed false gods, killed homosexual haters and racists),_ the Leviathan taking over his body ( _more pain than his angelic grace could push away, burning and crawling over his essence),_ Dean’s disappointed eyes while he was taking on Sam’s madness ( _there was fear, at first, then just loneliness),_ Dean’s grief that Castiel had brought upon him by staying in Purgatory ( _tries so hard not to think about this, can’t help but remember how Dean had reached out to him and he carelessly pushed him away, like he hadn’t cared at all)_ , the feeling of Metatron slitting his throat, his grace pulsing outward…

Once Castiel left the bunker, he stayed crouched against a tree not a mile away from it, curled in on himself, hands gripping his hair tightly as he sobbed, stared blankly in front of him, clutched at his empty stomach, for two days.

 

_You can’t stay._

 

He realized quickly what his needs were as a human--food, water, shelter. His deeply programmed instincts as a soldier of the Lord took over: he needed to survive. He needed to survive, so that he could find his grace, and take back Heaven. This was his mission now. Taking a chapter out of the Winchester gospel, he found an abandoned house on the border of Lebanon to squat in. The third day he was there, a spindly, bearded homeless man happened upon the house. Castiel wanted to defend what was his, so he confronted the man. A former veteran, it turned out--but a black eye and a few broken ribs later, Castiel had kept the house for himself. After the man had left, he lay still for four days, knowing that any false movements could cause one his sharded ribs to stray and puncture his lungs. In that time he understood what real dehydration meant, the sickening feeling that he would die with his mouth feeling like a cracked, bloody desert.

He found food in garbages (he realized quickly that many restaurants don’t keep their scraps), drank water in dirty and stagnant creeks. Logically he knew that his body would get sick from this lifestyle, but it didn’t prepare him for the high fever and body-wracking chills he formed from his third week of living in the house. Knowing it was useless, he tore at the brown wallpaper in the house, covering himself with it to keep the chills at bay. The only reason he lived was because a group of boys found him while throwing rocks at the old windows. A rock hit Castiel in the leg and he inadvertently cried out. One boy brought his mother back hours later, and she tentatively set down a bag of sandwiches, celery sticks, aspirin, and two gallons of water. Castiel stared up at her and didn’t even know how to say thank you in his feverish state, so he simply stared.

 

_You can’t stay._

 

The first month in the house was difficult, but Castiel adapted to his conditions. He was able to sparse the food and water the mother had given him for two weeks; in this time he used his energy to scavenge any information he could find on Metatron. He lingered in darkened alleyways, listening to blue-uniformed men murmuring about strange people they saw among the town: people that they had no business arresting simply because they were creepy with how much they stared. Castiel collected discarded newspapers, peeling them off the street, the ink faded with wet mold. He listened to the whispers of people sleeping rough under the bridges.

Eventually, he found the group of fallen angels in Lebanon that had secured vessels.

Two of the fallen angels had been sympathizers to Raphael’s side in the war; Castiel learned that day how to cauterize a wound slashed across his stomach to prevent infection and pop his dislocated shoulder back into place.

For a month and a half he stayed in the house, a mere eight miles from the bunker, shivering violently in the cold at night and lurking Lebanon’s dark corners for information and food during the day, wondering if Dean and Sam had gotten any further in finding Metatron.

He pointedly did not think about only Dean--if he thought about _only_ Dean, well. He knew that thinking about only Dean brought first grief; then anger; then the feeling of rejection so strong he didn’t know how to get up from the blow. All the while admonishing himself for still loving the man that seemed to paid no mind to his health and safety. So, he would not think about Dean. He is a soldier, surviving. Thinking about Dean meant death.

 

_You can’t stay._

 

It was in the dead of night on the 45th day he was squatting in the house that Tareal found him.

***

When Dean sees the stick people or _whatever_ they are again, it almost gets him killed.

Sam had found a case that morning, in the middle of their breakfast. “So get this,” he begins, only pausing to take a quick sip of scalding coffee, “there’s been a death in a small town in Minnesota, but it seems a little fishy.” He looked up at Dean and grinned, “Well, fishy because the town is like on a riverfront, and you know, fish--”

Dean threw his head back theatrically and groaned. “Sammy, I swear to _God--”_

“Okay, okay, you hate sunshine and h appiness in the morning, I forgot. Anyway, there is a bluff in this town on the riverbed, and someone was reported jumping off of it--suicide, right? Some of the details seemed weird to me so I had Charlie hack the coroner’s report, and look.” He circled his laptop around on the table to face Dean, tapping the top of the screen. “Seem familiar to you?”

Dean and Cas leaned in, heads almost bumping together. Dean looked up at Sam. “Vamp bites.”

Sam shut his laptop firmly, almost taking off one of Cas’s fingers as he was reaching toward the screen for a better look. “Looks like we got a case.”

Now, Dean finds himself slumped in a way that is probably no good for his back behind the driver’s wheel, lazily speeding down the highway to somewhere called Red Wing in Minnesota. Sam’s fancy phone let them know they would be there in no less than nine hours. Dean was taking this challenge very seriously by driving a consistent fifteen miles above the maximum speed limit eastbound on I-80.

“Their motto is ‘Come for a visit, stay for a lifetime’”, Sam comments as he reads through the Wikipedia page. “Population sixteen-thousand-something…Oh, they’re the home of the Red Wings shoes company.”

Dean grunts, “The hell are those?”

“Dean,” Sam laments. “You’re wearing a pair of their boots. You even ordered them on their website.”

Dean glowers at Sam as Cas quietly grins in the backseat.

“Facts about the case,” Dean barks, wanting the subject to change from how unobservant he is to something actually important.

“It’s probably a vampire nest,” Sam concludes. “Many “suicides” and disappearances had been occurring in the area lately. The best thing to do is smoke them out before the nest inevitably moves on, since they’re causing such an obvious disturbance.”

“Perhaps they thought the town was so small, that hunters would not pay attention,” Cas pipes from the backseat.

Dean stares at him through the rearview mirror. “Cas, you ever heard of a hunter ganking something in a big city? Shit like this _only_ goes down in small towns.”

Cas nods, picking a ketchup stain on his knee that he had acquired at lunch. “I have much to learn, it seems.”

Sam abruptly huffs a loose strand out of his face, and Dean acknowledges that Sam is probably more irked than Dean is by Cas’s silent pity party that he’s been throwing since returning to the bunker. “It’s okay, Cas,” Dean intervenes. “You got time to learn.”

Wiggling in his seat, Sam turns to Cas. “Hey, so I was researching about your grace--turns out Metatron has a library that he used to visit a lot that’s on Earth, one of the fallen angels we met on our last hunt was telling me--maybe if we found that--”

“I have no need to look for my grace at the present moment, Sam.” Dean notices that Cas looks very uncomfortable, sitting straight up in his seat.

“But we can look for it. After we take care of these vampires, maybe we can stick around in the area and do a little research. The angel was indicating that it might be in the midwest--”

Cas holds up a hand. He smiles, but his eyes don’t agree with the sentiment. “It really is fine.”

In a blink, Sam’s face has crumpled into a worried look that he usually reserves for the witnesses the Winchester brothers are interviewing. “Why don’t you want to find it? Did something happen?”

Dean grips the steering wheel tighter, seeing the blank look enter Cas’s face--the one that he wore whenever Dean asked him what happened in his time before returning to the bunker. The one that he saw moments before Dean kicked him out into the cold.

“There are other things at hand,” Cas replies. “Such as finding Metatron.”

“But if we find your grace, that brings us closer to finding him.”

“There are many angels looking for him, angels more capable than I.”

“Cas, your grace is _you_ , are you just going to be a human forever?”

If Dean has to flicker his eyes back to Cas and see his broken look from talking about this one more time, he will burst a blood vessel. “Sammy, _leave it,”_ he growls.

Sam whirls on him. “Dean, come on, this makes sense and you know it. Cas just isn’t Cas right now.”

“Leave it, Sammy!” Dean roars as he sees Cas’s face crumple. Sam blinks at him, knowing that he has missed a part of the equation in this conversation but not knowing where. Cas sits straight as a plank, staring ahead at the road and making no eye contact.

Silence permeates the rest of the car ride.

 

Red Wing is a small, unassuming town. Parked in the far-flung outskirts of the Minneapolis-St.Paul area, it is tucked between hills and the Mississippi River. Its Main Street (that runs through the only part of downtown), is under construction, making Dean anxious with what little traffic it is causing. While they lull in the clogged street, waiting for a traffic light to turn, people tap on the window and ask Dean if he is here for the classic car show. Being in the charming mood that he is since Cas’s assumed almost-breakdown, he barks at them to back off from the paint job. Sam waves them on with a polite smile, ignoring his temperamental brother.

“Too goddamn hot,” Dean mutters as he stretches out his back. They had safely arrived at the base of the hill where they planned to climb to the top of the bluff.

Sam throws a water bottle at him. “Better shed a layer, we’ll be walking a bit.”

“Where do we assume the vampires are hiding?” Cas asks as he strips off his denim jacket, throwing it into the backseat.

Sam shoves a couple of granola bars into his backpack. “Who knows. The best we can do is track them from where we know they threw that guy off the top of the bluff.”

Dean nearly misses Sam saying this, being taken aback by the tan muscle of Cas’s arms as he sheds his jacket. “Uh, yeah,” he supplies unhelpfully, eyes wandering up Cas’s softly muscled arms, exposed neck, to his pursed and plump lips as Cas tips his head back and takes a long drag of the water bottle, the condensation dripping down his cheek and _Jesus._

Dean is the fastest one to retreat up the hill, getting away as quickly as he can.

 

The sun is beginning its descent when they reach the top. Scanning the ground with flashlights on their phones, Cas makes a small noise and holds up an object as Sam and Dean close in on him. “Maybe this is helpful?” he suggests, the colored glass glinting in the light.

 

“Has to be from the glass-stained window of a church, man, there’s like a thousand of them here.” Dean throws his bag onto the bed, kicking off his boots. “On basically every corner. That wasn’t weird to anyone else?”

Cas nods solemnly. “Perhaps the people here have much to atone for.”

“I still think that it’s part of a bottle of some kind,” Sam argues. “There’s an old glass factory on the edge of town, and that’s a prime squatting place.”

“Fine,” Dean sighs, settling onto the bed, still fully clothed. “You check that out in the morning, me and Cas’ll look for any abandoned churches. Maybe they’re hiding in plain sight.”

If Sam finds it strange that Dean picks Cas for the second hunt in a row to investigate with him, he doesn’t say anything. Dean knows that this is the most logical set-up: Cas is a new hunter, could easily get hurt, and he knows that Sam would put his defenses down to keep him safe. This way, Dean knows that there’s no distraction for Sam if he runs into any trouble, and Cas is safe at Dean’s side.

 

It’s Dean’s night for having the bed to himself. He is woken by a tentative but repetitive poke on his arm. “Cas?” He wakes groggily, fully aware that there is drool on his cheek.

“Sam is… snoring,” Cas explains, casting a ruffled frown towards Sam’s gigantic form on the bed, sprawled haphazardly in all directions. “Would it be possible for me to borrow a blanket so I may sleep on the ground?”

Dean cuts a groggy hand through the air, rolling onto his stomach. “Nah, man, get over here,” he murmurs, still fuzzy with sleep. “Share with me.”

He feels the mattress dip next to him, Cas settling into a pillow very close to Dean’s head. He knows Cas is turned toward him because he can feel his breath on the back of his head. After a few moments of silence: “Dean?”

“Mmmhmmm?”

“If I get my grace again… I’m afraid of what I might do.” At Dean’s silence, he continues. Dean can hear his voice soft and a bit choked. “I’m… so angry. The times in the past where I have caused destruction… they’ve been done out of good intentions. Attempts to protect you--and Sam. I’m afraid of what I might do with that power if I’m this angry.”

Dean drowsily reaches out, claps Cas on the shoulder. The action causes his arm to lay heavily across Cas’s chest, but neither of them mind. “It’ll be ‘kay, Cas,” Dean slurs with sleep. “I got ya.”

Cas sighs. “Thank you, Dean.”

Dean doesn’t take his arm back for the rest of the night, but neither him nor Cas mention it.

***

**3 ½ months previous**

Tareal was a fallen angel. He took a vessel that looked much like Dean’s persona: sandy-blonde hair, easy smile, broad shoulders. “Got a lot of people lookin’ for you, brother,” he drawled, leaning against the doorway of the dilapidated house.

Castiel rose the two-by-four that he had found in the rubble up in defense. “What in the hell are you doing here?” His voice is calloused with disuse and dehydration.

“Easy, Castiel. I’m one of our brothers and sisters that doesn’t want your head on a pike.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Castiel growled, raising his weapon at a more threatening height. Tareal was known in Heaven as a loose canon, a volatile angel that was not to be trusted… much like Uriel ended up being.

Tareal ran his fingers through his hair, sighing, seeming at complete ease with his vessel in the months that he has worn him. “Listen, brother. I know that you’re looking for Metatron. Ran into a few of our sisters that tried to kill you a few weeks back. When you banished them, they ended up on their asses in front of the gas station that my vessel worked at--they were pretty pissed. But what I could get out of them, is that your grace is what caused this mess.”

Castiel narrowed his eyes, feeling his grip against the board dig painfully into his palms. “Yes,” he admitted, for the first time since he had told Sam and Dean, “I caused this. I helped Metatron close Heaven. I thought I was doing the right thing.” Now he is estranged from his brethren as well as his two closest friends, he didn’t add.

Tareal cocked his head to the side, eyeing Castiel with a scrupulous eye. “What do you plan on doing once you find Metatron?”

Castiel felt the flash of anger that sparked so quickly through him that colors burst into his vision. “Kill him,” he grounded out. “He cannot live after what he has done.”

Tareal considered this for a moment, nodding. With an easy transition, he went from serious to casual smiles once again. Clapping Castiel on the shoulder and ignoring how he flinched defensively, he asked, “Then how would you like to do that?”

Castiel shook his head. “It’s impossible. Without my grace, I am useless.”

“We can get you grace. _Borrowed_ grace.”

Castiel’s eyes widened, and he felt his expression of complete horror stretch the dirt caked on his face. “No, I will not kill a brother to take their grace!”

Raising an eyebrow, Tareal leaned forward closely, completely unaffected by Castiel’s stench from not showering for weeks. “Even our brothers and sisters that are trying to kill you?”

He growled, shoving Tareal away from him. “Leave me. What you’re suggesting is horrendous. I will not kill my own family.”

Tareal sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Castiel realized with a sharp pang in his chest that Dean often did this gesture. “Castiel, we’re at war. I don’t think you understand the sheer gravity of the situation. The angels, without a home and without a leader, are dividing into factions. Some love Earth and worship the mud monkeys, such as you, and are perfectly fine with staying. They’re not kicking up a fuss. But some of us,” Tareal gestured to his general self, “want to return home. And the ones that hated you in the first place, well they _really_ hate you now. And the ones that may have been on your side before, hate you still because it was your grace that doomed us to this predicament. But some, such as Hannah,” Castiel perked up his head to the familiar name of the angel who had always been loyal to God that he recognized, “don’t care about who started this, and only want to finish it. To kill Metatron and take back Heaven. We only want to recruit people. Including you.”

Unable to form an eloquent sentence, Castiel stared at the holes in his shoes. He was tired; weary. And he only wanted to help. Finally, he sighed into the quiet. “I want to help. As a human. I will not take another’s grace.”

Tareal nodded, a dark look flashing over his face. “Give me time. I'll convince you.”

Before Castiel can protest, he was fluttered away from the house that he called home for the last 45 days, the force of it knocking the two-by-four to the ground. It made a loud clutter in the empty space.  


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To my subscribers currently following this story: I split up chapter one into two chapters, so the formatting would make more sense, so you actually want chapter 3 (it's the new chapter I posted today).

After Sam drive off in the Impala, Dean and Cas make their way up the hill from the center of town to the first abandoned church they found the previous day by circling around the town. It was not difficult to spot the possibilities; there are more churches than restaurants in Red Wing.

“Had to build the damn town...on a damn hill,” Dean huffs as they tread up the hill, Cas stepping easy and light next to him.

“Dean, do you need to rest?”

“No, goddamnit, I can climb a damn hill!”

“Perhaps the comment Sam made to you last night is not out of turn. You really aren’t getting any younger. Maybe a salad--”

Dean stops to grab Cas by the arm and point a finger in his face. “Cas, you really don’t want to go there with me.”

Shrugging him off, Cas continues up the hill. “As a human, I’m realizing how important food is. The right sort of food. Without the right nutrients, your body is in peril.”

Dean scoffs, “In _peril_ , what are we, in a James Bond movie? My body is not in ‘ _peril’._ Besides, all the grease from my burgers just slides all the bad stuff right out.” He grins brilliantly at Cas, who wrinkles his nose.

“Dean… please. As Sam often says: I don’t need a visual.”

Dean throws his head back and laughs, forgetting for the next few minutes that he’s climbing a ‘damn hill’ as he continues to attempt to gross Cas out about bodily functions.

Once they reach the front of the church, the conversation has turned to strategies on how to get Sam’s snoring under control. Dean had awkwardly suggested that he and Cas could just share a bed on every hunt, because that would make sense, it would confine snoring Sam to one corner of the motel room, right? He trails his rambling off abruptly when a side glance reveals that Cas is no longer listening, and instead has his blue eyes fixed onto the church hovering over them.

It may have been beautiful, once; the stones had been painted white, now chipping to reveal the faded red-brown brick underneath the exterior. Vines had curled their fingers around the shattered stained-glass windows and two great wooden double-doors, shrouding the building in a private secrecy. The concrete steps leading up to the entrance of the church had cracked in various places; a rotting wooden chair meant for the church greeter once upon a time was casually sprawled in the way of the entrance.

Cas tugs the sleeve of Dean’s rough jacket. “Dean…” He points to the two stained-glass windows in the front of the church, extending almost as tall as the structure itself, one window punctured and dripping glass.

Dean nods, “Yup, this could be the place.” He whips out his cell phone and punches Sam on speed dial.

“Hey, Dean.”

“Hey, Sammy. Church looks promising. We’re gonna check it out.”

“Okay. Not much here on my end; even though, if I was a vamp, I would peg it as an ideal location.”

“Um…” Dean holds out an arm and catches Cas across the chest, who seems dead-set on navigating the broken concrete steps to investigate the entrance. “Yeah, Sammy, you’d make a great Dracula.”

“I’m just saying. I’ll head over now. Text me if you need backup, and stay safe.”

“Have your face… stay safe,” Dean mutters as he shuts the phone on Sam’s likely confused look. “Not that way, Cas, Jesus. We have to take ‘em by surprise. We’ll find a back way.”

“But it is daytime… won’t they be asleep anyway?”

“Can’t take too many chances, especially with a baby hunter like you.”

“Dean, I am as old as the Earth. Please stop implying that I am a child.”

The back entrance is found through whacking old ivy and bushes to find an unassuming door tucked into the stone. Thanks to decades of ticks making the wood their daily breakfast, Dean easily shoulders it open. Gun and flashlight in hand, Cas at his side calmly holding a long machete, they carefully navigate the dank hallways of the church.

Giving Cas’s calf a tap with his foot, Dean tilts his head in the direction of the door with a faded sign on top of it: ‘Basement’. The Lutherans always did like their shit labelled, Dean notices.

Cas slowly creaks the door open while Dean pockets his gun and pulls out his own machete, a twin of Cas’s weapon. When Sam and Dean had discussed their hunting strategies to Cas, they explained: one person goes through swinging, the other watches their back. Don’t focus on who they’re killing in front of you; your job is to make sure no one is sneaking up behind you.

Taking his job very seriously, Cas opts to climb down the stairs to the basement behind Dean backwards, warily watching the doorway they came through.

Dean reaches the bottom of the stairs, breath hissing quietly and slowly through his nose. He sees a foot sprawled out in front of him, and bloodstains on the concrete walls where he shines his flashlight. Carefully, he reaches down into his pocket where his open flip phone lies and hits the big, round ‘send’ button on a pre-made text message to Sam: ‘Need that backup.’

Carefully scanning the flashlight at the top of the walls so as not to shine it in any sleeping vamp’s face, Dean surveys the room. A basement lobby, perfect rectangle, with faded carpet and faded pictures of children’s faces proclaiming that Jesus loves them. He sees the huddled forms of sleeping vampires--sees no immediate window that they can access to bring the sunlight in. Bringing down this party will be more difficult than normal.

In the far left corner from where he and Cas stand, he sees a woman, wide-eyed and face bloodstained. She is cuffed and has a chain around her neck, looping around the hand of a sleeping vampire next to her. She stares at Dean with listless eyes, so still that he thinks she might be dead. Around her, Dean sees unusual shadows casted by his flashlight. Two tall, slender shadows that seem as if they could be people tucked into the corner with her, dark and emaciated and their blood probably sucked dry…

Dean can feel his arm hairs stand on end when he sees one of the shadowed stick people turn toward him. Smouldering red eyes with no pupils on its otherwise dark face lock onto him. Dean can feel the air around him take on a static; a feel of lightning thrumming through his skin that Cas used to elicit as an angel whenever Dean stood too close to him.

Forgetting his training, forgetting Cas’s safety, he takes an abrupt step back from the stick people. His foot catches Cas’s, and they both fall against the stairs, Dean’s flashlight clattering loudly to the ground.

_Shit shit shit shit shit_

He blindly reaches out and grabs his flashlight. Raises it to see the damage done.

Every vampire in the room is now standing, eyes trained on him and Cas, terraced and bloodied teeth flashing in the dark.

Cas is the one who breaks the awkward silence. “Dean, _run_!” Suddenly he is being pushed to his feet and thrown up the stairs.

He makes to protest but then realizes the stupidity of trying to take a colony of vampires on a narrow set of shaky stairs. He grabs at Cas’s arm to make sure he is following, and the two of them clobber to the upstairs lobby. Cas surges forward and rips open every old curtain he can find, letting in the bright afternoon sun. Dean and Cas stand shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the room, weapons raised at the advancing crowd of pissed off vampires.

When Dean and Sam fight, it is like a complicated, well-polished dance. Decades of fighting monsters by each other’s side has perfected it. Even Dean and Cas (when he was an angel) found a rhythm with each other, Dean sticking a monster and throwing it to the angel to smite down. Truthfully, with mojo-ed Cas it felt like a vacation.

Now, Dean doesn’t know how to fight with this human next to him. He is still Cas, a strong and strategic soldier of Heaven, but without his power, in a fight he may as well be a stranger.

As it turns out, an ex-angel of the Lord is a homicidal kamikazee.

When the first vampire gets to Dean and Cas, carefully avoiding the sunlight streaming in the room, as it reaches its hands toward Dean, Cas swiftly grabs it by the back of the shirt, throws it to the side, and whacks its head off while it stumbles, trying to recover. Dean stares as blood splatters and stains the room.

Two vampires smack into Dean at once, pinning him to the wall. He pushes one back and sticks a machete into it as Cas smacks into the other, rolling both of them on the ground, smoothly finding his way into a crouch and slamming the machete against the vampire’s neck on the floor.

As Dean hacks his way through the snarling crowd, he can see Cas cooly maneuvering his way through vampires tossing themselves at him, fighting in a way that should be crude and clumsy, but recovering his efforts smoothly. He looks as he did when he was an angel, with his same calculated and deadly movements, but more brutal, more bloody. Like a guerilla street fighter with a light background in Jijitsu.

Just as the last vampire nearest to him is being brutalized by his now-black machete, Dean looks over to see Cas struggling with a thick, tall vampire towering over him, grabbing Cas by the shoulders and shaking him like he is nothing but a rag doll. Cas attempts to raise his weapon against him. The vampire clutches Cas’s arm and yanks it backward, displacing it from its socket. Cas only misses a beat, blinking against the pain as he uses his good arm to throw a blow to the vampire’s head.

Dean makes a move forward to help; hesitates.

Those stick figures from the basement are slowly drifting toward where Cas is fighting. Dean feels the electric chill zing through his body again, making it impossible to move.

Cas is thrown against the wall, his head cracking against it. The vampire hesitates briefly before he charges at him from across the room. The stick figures loom over Cas as he breathes heavily, trying to recover from the blow, a trickle of blood running down his forehead. One of them stares over at Dean with those blood eyes. The other begins reaching for Cas’s wide, shocked blue eyes.

It’s enough to get Dean to snap out of it. “Get away from him, you son of a bitch!” Dean barrels toward the side of the vampire, knocking him away with his sheer force of weight before he can reach Cas. Lacking Cas’s grace, Dean tumbles to the ground with the large man next to him, smacking his hands away as he attempts to grab Dean by the throat, heavy body pressing on top of him. Not enough hands to push away the vampire’s head, however; Dean lets out a pained growl as the vampire’s teeth sink into his neck.

He curls up his legs underneath the vampire’s chest and pushes his feet bluntly against it. He feels a sick tear of his skin across his clavicle and shoulder as the vampire’s teeth skid away from his neck. Cas has lifted himself from the wall, one arm limply hanging at his side, and brings the machete down one-handed on the burly man. The first blow doesn’t quite go through his neck, and the vampire reaches a large hand up, grabs Cas’s wrist, and twists until there is a wet snap. Cas cries out but doesn’t relent; shoving a foot down onto the vampire’s forehead, keeping him in place as he brings the machete down again, using his entire body weight against it.

Just as machete connects with the wood floor beneath the vampire, the double doors burst open and Sam comes running in. Seeing Cas bent on the floor among the scattered vampire bodies, and Dean lying prone with blood quickly rushing out of his left shoulder and neck, he yells, “What the hell happened?!”

Dean rises, biting out a humourless grin. “Nice timing, Sammy.”

Cas passes out onto the floor next to him.

***

“That’s all the description you can give me? _Stick people_?”

“Yeah, Sam, cause that’s what they are,” Dean snaps back, roughly sloshing rubbing alcohol against one of the motel towels. He crosses to where Cas sits at the edge of the bed, staring mutely at the ground. “Head forward, buddy. Gotta look at the wound,” he says in a more gentle tone.

Sam bites his lip and scrolls through internet pages on his laptop while Dean dabs at the gash on the back of Cas’s head. Dean already cleaned and patched his neck and shoulder wound earlier, waving off Sam when he tried to help. Cas had received more beatings from the vampire brawl. They had to stop by Red Wing's one and only small hospital to get his broken wrist splinted.

Now Cas had a listless look in his eyes, possibly from the concussion he received when being thrown against the wall.

“I apologize, Dean,” he murmurs, his chin tucked into his chest as Dean cleans his head wound.

Dean snorts. “For what, Cas? Fighting like a bad-ass?”

Cas lifts his eyes and regards him skeptically. “You think I was ‘bad-ass’?”

“Hell yeah,” says Dean. “Where the hell did you learn to fight like that without your mojo?”

“During my homeless enlightenment period,” says Cas very solemnly.

“Okay, okay, yeah, sure….”

“Dean,” Sam calls from the other side of the room. “I think I found something.”

Giving Cas a grin and lightly scuffing his chin with his fist, Dean crosses the room and leans over Sam’s shoulder. He squints at the image on the screen. “Yup… that’s them. What site is this?”

“‘The Paranormal Finders”, Sam announces. “It’s a blog. They call them the Black Stick Men. Some people have seen them, but there are no official documented sightings. Just people commenting on the blog about their own personal stories--probably a good amount of them are fake. Mostly they’ve just been the inspiration for different art pieces, and I guess from there people assumed that they could be paired with the supernatural.”

Dean sighs and hangs his head. “Great, I would see shit that has no information about it. When are they supposed to come out and play? I saw them on the road and in a vamp’s basement. There’s no connection there.”

Sam cranes his head around to look at his brother. “Those are the only times you saw them?”

Shifting uncomfortably, Dean glances over at Cas, who is absentmindedly pawing at the gauze Dean left on the bed. “I saw them when Cas was thrown against the wall by that vamp,” Dean says. “One of them looked at me, and it had glowing red eyes. No pupils.” He tacks on a murmured, “They made me hesitate. Almost got Cas real hurt that way.”

“It says here,” Sam says slowly, “that they often appear in abandoned roads, or in dark alleyways, and they usually are in the shadows. They’re silent and don’t approach unless provoked. Nothing about red eyes.”

“I don’t know, man… heat of the moment. Maybe I was seeing things.”

“Do you think maybe they appear around the supernatural? When something supernatural is occurring? Or maybe even around a supernatural death…” Sam trails off, the rest of his sentence playing inside his brain.

“That could be something. They were by the dead vic in the basement, too.”

“They could be signaling something. Something foreboding. Maybe they’re harmless, but we can never be too careful.” Sam reaches for Dean’s shoulder and clasps it tight. “Dean, next time you see them, get the hell out. I don’t know what they mean, no one knows what they mean, and they seem to appear when things are dangerous. I don’t know what they want with you, but you have to be careful.”

Dean shrugs his hand off. “Sammy, your face has to be careful.”

“Oh my God, Dean--”

“I know, I know, geez. I’ll be careful. And you’ll be the first to know next time I start hallucinating them,” he adds, batting his eyes down at his younger brother.

Sam sighs, pushing back a stray mop of his hair. “That’s all I ask, dude.”

 

Dean sleeps restlessly that night.

Cas and Sam’s snores flanking him on either sides of the room do little to ease his anxieties. He dreams of Sam unconscious and bloody on a basement floor, shadows reaching for him; of a younger Sam and a younger Dean chasing each other in the park with sticks, pretending to be knights of a castle fighting each other, the shadows reaching for little Sam as he tripped on a tree root and sprawled on the ground, crying over his busted knee; of a human Cas stirring a pot of boiling noodles, greeting Dean as he is coming through the kitchen with a broad smile and a chaste kiss, the shadows clouding Cas’s frame, snatching him away. Of Mary, singing to Dean to ease his nightmares in the middle of the night, oblivious to the shadows that are branching toward her against the walls. After each dream Dean wakes with hitched breath, not knowing what the hell he dreamed, but feeling as if it was very real.

He sits up in his bed, rubbing a hand down his face slowly. As his slotted fingers slide past his eyes, he catches movement against the wall in front of him.

The glaring fluorescent lights in the parking lot outside shine blurrily through the window, casting shadows over the corners. In front of the dirty blue curtains that lined the windows, blocking the light, are two five-foot stick men, their shrunken, thin heads turned in Dean’s direction.

He might still be dreaming, so he carefully folds back the sheets and rises from the bed. He stares at the unmoving figures, only flinching slightly when Sam snorts and noisily rolls over in his bed. The logical thing would be to wake him and Cas up, but all Dean can focus on is the charged electricity in the air and the spindly shapes of men in front of him.

He takes a step toward them; a mistake. Without warning, the one on the right comes rushing toward him in a hurried black flash, red eyes opening and coming straight toward his face. With a bit out curse, Dean holds up his arms in defense. He can feel the electric air bolt through him, like his whole body connected with a spark plug and now his nerves are fried. Around him, he sees distorted shadows, black and white movements, all contrasting shades folding in on each other. He is suddenly transported from the dull hues of the motel room and thrown into a world of sharp contrast of dark and light and no in between.

“What the fuck,” he growls, whirling around in wild circles to find the way out. His knee connects with something hard, and he stumbles to the ground. In front of him he sees in three perfect rows the stick men, at least ten in each row, looming over him now at least ten feet above the ground, standing eerily still. “Sam!” Dean calls. “Where the hell are you!”

From the middle of the shadows, breaking the black stick men’s ranks, steps a man that is a normal size, standing at a normal height, his clothes white yet his face black, contracting and distorting. “Dean,” it says. It has Cas’s voice.

“Cas?” he chokes out. “What the fuck?”

The face is constantly changing, flickering from a bloody doll's head to a crow’s beak and beady eyes to a shriveled old man to a skull to a laughing child with missing teeth. Dean can’t decide if he’s on an acid trip or in the middle of the universe’s greatest practical joke.

“Dean, wake up. Wake _up_!”

One more blink, and Dean abruptly sees Sam and Cas staring down at him, colors reset to normal, the stark light from the parking lot shining in and pooling onto their worried faces. For a moment, they stay still blinking at each other, until--

“What on God’s fucking green Earth was that!” Dean roars at them.

“I saw them too, Dean.” Sam is breathing heavily. “I saw them this time too.”

Dean spits out, “Well did you also get transported to the wacky world of fucking horrors?!”

Cas kneels in front of Dean, who had fallen onto the cheap carpet next to the bed, placing a placating hand on his shoulder. “Dean, breathe. You have to calm down if you’re to tell us what happened.”

After muttering string of creative curses, Dean finally forces himself to look at Cas’s calm glass-blue eyes. He lets himself think back to the dream of domesticity he had about Cas earlier, which seems to redirect his brain in a more terrifying but more pleasant direction.

After all the lights were flung on to dispel any shadows from the room and the three men were sitting down and settled onto their respective beds, Dean explains what happened. He decides to leave out the fact that the distorted face that he saw was in fact Cas’s.

Cas is sitting close to Dean, almost shoulder to shoulder, posture defensive and glancing around the room periodically. “There are two possible options. The first, somehow it distorted your perception of our reality, or it transported you to an entirely new one.”

Sam and Dean stare at Cas.

“Like… a different dimension?” Sam leans forward, his eyes igniting with interest.

“Yes. If you say that many of the stick men appeared to you there, that may be the pocket dimension in which they reside.”

Dean scrubs his face with his hand. “That’s… freaky, man.”

With a straight face but shining eyes Cas agrees, “Freaky.”

“What do they want with Dean?” Sam asks.

“Who cares what they want? Next time I see them I’m going to gank those sons of bitches,” Dean declares, rising to his feet and yanking on his jeans that he had taken off for the night.

“What, like, now?”

“Well obviously not _now_ , but when they come back.”

Cas pulls out his phone, extending his arm and holding the screen straight in front of him as he composes a text message with his right index finger. “I will text Hannah. Ask her if there have been other sightings. Angels are attuned to dimension walkers.”

Dean scoffs. “Okay, grandpa.”

“In the meantime, Dean, we should research what could kill them," Sam offers. "You said you felt electricity whenever they’re by, so we’ll find a monster that correlates with that and see if there’s known weapons against them.”

Dean flops onto the bed, wrestling his left boot onto his foot. “This is all great, guys, seriously, but if you think I’m spending one more night in Creeper’s Murder Mansion you got another thing coming. We’re going back to the bunker where it’s safe until we get a game plan.”

Cas’s face scrunches, deep in thought at the reference.

“It’s a movie,” Dean explains.

The ex-angel nods, turning his attention back to composing his text message at a painfully disinclined pace.

***

**2 months previous**

“Cas…”

Dean is in the doorway of his room. Castiel is lying on one of the many beds in the bunker, in one of the many rooms. The sheets are warm and soft. The lamp on Castiel’s end-table casts a warm glow about the room. “Dean… hello,” he ventures, very confused. “What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for you…” Dean steps into the room, shuts the door, and sits on the edge of the bed next to where Castiel is scrambling up onto his elbows. “I needed to see you.”

The longing in Dean’s face is too much for Castiel to hold. “Why, Dean?” he whispered, voice suddenly gone.

Dean cups his hand against Castiel’s cheek; it’s calloused and scrapes pleasantly against his stubble. “I need you.”

Castiel nods, both hands gripping Dean’s bare arm, the one that is holding him. “You have me, Dean.” He stutters as his heart scampers a beat in his chest. “Y-you’ve always had me.”

“That’s good, Cas. That’s really good.” Dean’s smile is blinding, his eyes green with flecks of hazel. They seem to be glimmering: at Castiel. The warmth that Castiel feels in his chest from bringing a smile to Dean’s face is more zoetic than his grace felt.

Dean presses his lips to Castiel’s once, twice, gently. Castiel threads his hands through Dean’s short hair--softer than he imagined--and guides him to lay with him, slotted into his side. Dean cups Castiel’s face into his hand. Castiel wraps his arms around his waist. They lazily explore each other, what caress from Dean will catch Castiel’s breath, what way Castiel hungrily licking into Dean’s mouth will cause him to grasp Castiel tighter, eliciting restless moans. Dean nuzzles his face into his neck, whispering words of adoration against his flushed skin.

“Wanted to do this for years, Cas… It’s always been more for me, Cas… You’re glowing to me, angel or not…”

Castiel runs his fingers down Dean’s back, whispering his name in reverie. It’s so easy, to caress Dean, to cherish Dean, to love Dean. He strokes his fingertips placidly against Castiel’s side, his fingernails leaving shivering trails on his skin through his thin t-shirt, sighing into Castiel’s mouth. Castiel shifts his body to lay across Dean, legs bracketing his hips, chest pushed against Dean's. Tipping Dean's chin back with his fingers, he seeks purchase deeper into his mouth; Dean moans and Castiel can feel a fire lighting low in his gut. Dean grasps his hips and rocks him forward into him, both already hard against each other. It was enough to almost cause Castiel to become animalistic and tear Dean's clothes off in a lustful frenzy. Instead he groans and presses his forehead against Dean's, breathing each other's air with quick gasps.

“Cas…”

Castiel breaks away, a soft smile on his lips. They feel swollen. He loves the feeling. All he can smell and feel around him is _Dean Dean Dean_. Now that they have this, now that there are no walls between them, they will never be apart again. His brittle human heart is swelling. “Yes, Dean?”

“I need you. You have to come back.”

Castiel frowns. “You… told me to go.” With a sickening lurch of his stomach, he begins to remember. _No no no--_

Dean rises. The warmth is gone. Castiel grabs at empty air; can’t let him leave, can’t let him disappear. “No, Dean--”

“Come back, Cas. I need you.”

“Dean, I can’t--you told me to leave-- _Dean!_ ” Castiel is left alone, now on a thin mattress by himself between coarse sheets, holding himself in a tightly wound ball and clutching at his hair. He couldn’t stop saying Dean’s name, even after he woke from the dream and felt the hot tears sliding on his cheeks.

Castiel opened his eyes to see Tareal sitting at the kitchenette table on the other side of the motel room, arms crossed and eyes examining Castiel thoughtfully. They regarded each other for a painful moment, Castiel feeling naked in his gaze. The once-angel slowly rolled his body to lay on his other side, facing the blank grey wall. His body is cold, graceless, and the world without Dean is without color once again.

***

“Hey, Castiel.” Sam strides into the kitchen.

Raising his eyes from his book, Castiel smiles at Sam, who is taking a seat at the table across from him. “Sam, hello.”

Sam reaches for an apple in the fruit bowl that he had set on the table a few days earlier (pointedly ignoring Dean making fun of him mercilessly), settling back into his chair. He gestures to the book. “Anything good?” he asks before taking a crunchy bite.

Castiel smiles fondly at the book, running his finger along the spine. “One of my favorites this week.”

“You mean one of the dusty books you found on ancient routes to Heaven is your favorite?” Sam remembers Castiel finding the book in a disused bookstore a few hunts ago in California, eyes wide when he realized how old and possibly legitimate it was.

“Oh, no, this is not one of those books. It is a book I found in the library here, where the Men of Letters keep the fiction. It is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.”

Sam nods slowly, accessing his memory of the Russian Literature course he had taken his sophomore year of college, back-handedly wiping apple juice off his chin. “Yeah, I’ve read that.”

Castiel leans forward, eyes wide. “You speak Russian?” he asks incredulously.

“What? No, no… it’s translated into tons of languages. English being one of them.”

He glances down at his edition of the book that he was reading in its original Russian dialect. “Oh,” he says.

There is a relaxed silence as Sam finishes his apple, opting to eat the core and all--why waste, after all. Castiel continues to run his hand over the faded pages of the book. He breaks the silence. “Sam… do you believe that there are cases in which murder is permissible?”

The younger Winchester tries not to be too put off by the question. They were talking about Crime and Punishment just a moment ago, after all. This is a natural segue. He looks at Cas’s haggard gaze. “Yeah, Cas… I think that sometimes killing is necessary. I mean, look at our lives. We kill all the time for the greater good.”

Cas averts his eyes, abruptly very interested in the coffee stain embedded into the table. “What if the greater good is mistaken as being something it is not. What if the intentions were there, but it was in fact for the opposite of the greater good.”

Sam is silent for a long minute. “I was reading a study the other day. It was about how we judge ourselves. These psychologists in the article were saying that we judge others by their behavior, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.” He sits up straighter, opening his hands. “If you think about it, this is what leads to our mistakes in the first place. We don’t think about our own behavior and how it could affect others, we just think about the intentions that are motivating us to do something. And usually, unless someone is a horrible human being, our intentions are good.”

Cas nods to indicate he is listening. Sam taps the open page of Cas’s book. “Look at Raskolnikov in this story,” he says, now on an academic roll. “He killed that pawnbroker and her sister, just so that the world would be without one more bad person. His intentions were make the world a better place, do something heinous like murder for the greater good. He ends up giving the money he stole from the pawnbroker to that family that needed it; still the greater good.”

“But he constantly questioned his intentions,” Castiel argues. “In the end he realized he was immoral because of it. He turned himself in. Only after serving his eight-year jail sentence was he able to redeem himself and truly be with the woman he loved.”

“Yeah, but that was his choice. He realized that he wasn’t murdering for the greater good at all; it was for greed. He realized his intentions weren’t calling to a higher purpose at all, like he convinced himself; his intentions were calling to his own personal gain.” Sam stares hard into Castiel’s eyes. “He wasn’t protecting anyone he loved. He was only protecting himself.”

Castiel nods, smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’m glad you have read the novel, so we can have in-depth discussion. Often times the implications of human nature 'uses my head as a launchpad and flings itself into outer space', to quote Dean. I have much to learrn."

“Yeah, I'm glad too. You know, you can talk to me or Dean anytime. About anything. Books or… not books.” Sam pastes a warm smile on his face, trying to look reassuring. He has no idea what happened to Castiel during his time out of the bunker; even less than what Dean knows.

All he knows is getting kidnapped by Bartholomew’s angels while on a hunt, and that Castiel and Dean had come after him. Sam remembers coming to consciousness in the hospital after the ordeal, seeing Dean and Castiel on the other side of the room, settled close to each other in two metal chairs. He remembers Dean clutching tightly onto Castiel’s shaking, gauntly thin form, Dean’s chin resting on top of his bowed head and glaring into empty space as Castiel sobbed quietly into his shoulder. Sam was stricken, having never seen Castiel break before. But it was the last time that he did since that day.

Castiel smiles at him across the table, closing his book and rising to leave the kitchen. “Thank you, Sam.”

 

“I’m worried about Cas,” says Sam at breakfast that next morning. Cas was up until dawn after he and Sam had talked, reading Crime and Punishment who knows how many times; Dean found him curled up in the armchair in the library that morning, and pushed him down the hallway into bed, explaining to a drousy and groucy Cas that beds are where people belonged when they slept.

Dean sets down the newspaper he was reading--some free one that Sam had picked up in Lebanon during a grocery run that early morning--and folds his arms, avoiding his steaming mug of coffee. “Yeah, well, me too. What do you want to do about it?”

Sam resolutely puts both hands on the table, leaning forward. “He needs his grace back. And I have leads on where to find it.”

Dean sighs. Nods once. “Let’s go get it back, then.”

* * *

 

In a separate dimension far away, a short, grey-bearded man toys with a pencil between his fingers. He looks down at the page of his book with beady eyes, grinning at the aerial image of a sleeping ex-angel, snugly cocooned in blankets that Dean had tucked him into, snoring softly.

“I have plans for you, little angel….” he sings fondly, to the image. “And bad little angels like you don’t get happy endings…”

* * *

 


	3. Chapter 3

Heaven is quiet. Unlike before Metatron put the red tape up, forbidding all who enter, there is no sound of humming graces or hushed souls joyfully enjoying their blissful eternity. There is no movement, no life.

Metatron loves every second of it. He wants it to expand, endlessly, as far as the eye can see. For the quiet to loop in on itself in a endless spiral. 

He sits at his desk, Gadreel sitting uncomfortably across the room. Ever since being expelled from Sam Winchester’s body, Gadreel has followed him like a lost puppy, following his every whim. He smiles a serene smile at the angel. “Any minute now,” he promises.

Gadreel opens his mouth, as it to comment. Thinks better of it, closes it.

Metatron taps his fingers in a steady rhythm against the polished wood, disturbing a few stray papers. Nothing is wrong to him about the quiet; he loves it. Revels in it. But he knows it is all about to end. 

With luck, everything will end. 

Then the quiet will come back. 

The doors to the office open without preamble, a towering man clad in black striding toward him. Gadreel rises to his feet and greets the stranger with a wary glance. 

“Ah, Stryker,” Metatron greets, straightening the dulled-green threads of his thick sweater. “Nice of you to show up.”

The man narrows his eyes, regarding the modest office with a skeptical glance. He’s not as Metatron pictured him. Spindly, rather than broad; narrow-featured and contrite, rather than menacing; a simple black peacoat overwhelming his frame. Certainly not the terrifying legend that was being whispered behind his back for centuries. “This is God’s ‘headquarters’,” he disbelieves. 

“We do what we can.” Metatron attempts to remain cordial. “I believe you had a proposition for me.”

Stryker’s electric blue eyes regard him. “It’s not a proposition. You either weave yourself a corner in my inevitable plan, or burn from it.”

“Well, that’s… very doomsday of you,” Metatron chuckles nervously as Gadreel takes a more defensive stance. “But I think you forget that I have the keys to Heaven.”

“You mean that seraph’s husk of a grace?” Stryker scoffs. He turns toward Metatron’s bookshelf, one that he had added to the office’s decorations earlier in the day. “That means nothing to me.”

“Except it should. Your plan includes a whole other apocolypse--turning the world into an ocean of fire before your goal is achieved. It’s a little, well, to put it lightly, messy. You’d have to let Lucifer and Michael out of their little playpens, and they’re righteous, whiny pricks so you’d have to deal with  _ that--” _

“Get to the point, little man.”

“My  _ point  _ is, if you’d find a little patience, that there is a different way to go about this. I’ve read the lore--I know what you’re capable of, what lineage you are from. I’ve been scribing for God since the world was created, remember. And I was by his side before the world was even a thought in his mind. Your goal and mine are one in the same: a reality reboot. And I have the golden ticket to that goal being achieved.”

Stryker stares at him for a moment before he understands. “The seraph’s grace?” he scoffs. “You’re wasting my time.”

“No, listen--” Metatron scrambles to his feet and stands in between Stryker and the door as he turns to leave. “I know the alternate method that can achieve your goal. I know how all of this can end in a seamless, fail-safe way--one that not even the Winchesters can get their stupid noses into and stop, because you know they’re going to try. And that alternate method is Castiel’s grace.” He clasps his hands behind him, settling back on his heels, smiling serenely. “Which I have direct access to.”

Stryker’s face remains impassive. “That doesn’t mean there’s a way to corrupt this grace,” he says.

“There is. Because Castiel has been reprogrammed hundreds of time since his creation. His wiring is wrong, always has been. Furthermore,” Metatron crosses his arms in front of him, face breaking into a wider grin, “there is the existence of Dean Winchester.” 

A barely audible sigh pushing through his nostrils, Stryker sits in the chair that Gadreel had once occupied. “Well, go on, little man, I’m listening.”

 

***

Every day on his own before meeting Tareal, Castiel mourned for the loss of his grace. Once able to repair, to comfort, to guide, he was now a husk of what we was. He saw an occasional beggar wandering through town, with severe symptoms due to exposure, and could not heal them. He saw dirty faces of children peeking through the tattered curtains of dilapidated houses, gaunt and hungry, and could not feed them. He witnessed a car crash while digging in the dumpster at the back of the only restaurant in Lebanon, a man’s leg broken and the other bleeding from his head, and he could not help them. 

Every day he felt a shade more useless, a shade less of the angel he used to be. He had no means of regaining his grace, no means of becoming stronger. 

Until Tareal.

Tareal represented a cause, a purpose; he took Castiel from the desolate streets of Lebanon and into the bustling city of Chicago. It was where most of the fallen angels on their side were congregating, he explained; one of the angel’s vessels owned a small apartment in an pre-World War era building that also housed a string repair shop. There were only eight angels, when Tareal and Castiel first arrived, their numbers steadily growing to the double digits and more by the day, the meetings becoming more and more cramped. 

In the presence of angels with burning, healthy graces, Castiel felt the throbbing hole where his grace once was all the more acutely. He felt lightness in his chest, when it used to be heavy with purpose; he was a leaf that could be knocked over with the slightest wind rather than an immovable wall that even the forces of Earth couldn’t shake. 

The other angels paid him little mind, either bearing no ill will toward him for his past actions or putting them aside in the midst of a greater struggle. Tareal was his only constant companion, taking him on whatever recruitment trip he travelled on to find more angels, or whatever lead he was assigned to take in search of Metatron’s occasional descents to Earth. News of possible factions that followed Metatron was circulating; factions that felt the only way to get back into Heaven was to follow Metatron like the real god he had become. It became the goal of Castiel’s Chicago angels to either eliminate or convert these factions.

In the light of Tareal’s friendship, Castiel thrived during the remainder of his time away from the Winchesters. Tareal was unlike other angels. He seemed to have grown into his vessel easily, with human aphorisms slipping easily off his tongue and limbs moving much less stiffly than their fellow brethren. He was more acclimated to his new body than Castiel, who was officially human. 

Castiel was tentative, at first, but eventually warmed to Tareal’s friendliness toward him. It was nice to have a friend, or something close to it, since the brothers--well, Dean--had dismissed him from the bunker. It was nice to have a friend whose relationship involved no coercion, no demands for his help that he couldn’t give, no history of bad blood between them. 

During his fourth month away from the bunker, Castiel and Tareal were directed to a possible lead to where one of Metatron’s possible group of followers were meeting. Being cut off from Heaven, grace weakening, Tareal hot-wired a car and they travelled the 200 miles by vehicle.

Tareal cranked the driver’s window open with the old-fashioned handle, holding out his hand to feel the rushing breeze. “So, you and Dean,” he said loudly above the wind.

Turning his head minutely, feeling his blood freeze in its veins at the name, Castiel hedged, “Yes?” when Tareal wouldn’t continue. 

Tareal shrugged one shoulder, leaning his arm against the steering wheel. “Must be a pretty big dick if he kicked you to the curb.”

“He had his reasons.”

“Brother, I saw the bad way that you were in at that house. There was no reason for that,” Tareal insisted.

Castiel felt the need to defend Dean, even after living all those months of anger and grief twisting like a knife in his chest. “He is a good man. I’ve seen his soul. He doesn’t make poor decisions without good reasons.”

Tareal fell quiet at that. “I fell in love with a human once.” When he was met with silence, he side-eyed Castiel for his reaction. “You don’t seem surprised.”

Castiel picked at the chipping interior by the dashboard. “It’s not impossible to do.”

“She was gorgeous. Roman. Her husband was a soldier, beat her. I took her away from him.” He sighed, shook his head. “But, she became pregnant. And we all know how that Nephilim stint turned out. So, Michael took it on himself personally to seek her out where I was hiding her, and kill her.”

“Why are you telling me this story?”

The car accelerated faster, and it was unable to take it. The windows and seats began shaking. “Having earthly ties leads to pain, Castiel. When we get your grace back, or any grace back for that matter, it’ll be best for you to come home, atone for what you’ve done in the past, and move on. Help us kill Metatron; become a hero again.” He stared hard at the ex-angel. “Then cut ties.” 

Castiel’s finger slipped, hitting the door handle. Giving Tareal a level gaze, he said, “I won’t leave Dean.”

“Even after he’s abandoned you to die?” Tareal gripped the steering wheel harder by a margin. “He has the nerve to make you fall, and then throw you on the street to drink your own piss--well, anyone who does that to a brother of mine isn’t worth the dirt he stands on.”

Castiel couldn’t think to why Tareal was getting so angry over a situation he knew nothing about, over a fellow ex-angel that he had no history with, but he didn’t comment on that. Instead: “He didn’t  _ make  _ me fall. I chose to go down that path. Instead of allegiance with Heaven, I chose death.” He settled back into his seat, bumping against the headrest. “I’ve made peace with my choices, and I’m ready for whatever comes.”

Tareal had nothing to say to that. Silence blanketed the car. 

 

***

Sam saunters into the kitchen, laptop tucked under his arm, a smile breaking his face. He snatches a donut from the box underneath Dean’s chin as his brother is stuffing his face with an eclair. 

“Hey!”

“Sharing is caring,” Sam replies, licking his fingers of sugar powder after popping a donut hole in his mouth. “Thanks for the breakfast.”

“What’s got you so chipper?” grumbles Dean, clutching his coffee like a lifeline, ever the morning person.

Sam glances around the kitchen. “Where’s Cas?”

“Kicked him out of the library and into his bed at five this morning. Sleeping beauty hasn’t moved since.”

“Okay, great. So, get this,” he begins, turning his laptop screen for Dean to see. “I was researching old libraries, abandoned or otherwise, to see if anything strange was happening in them lately. Stumbled on this, a library in Medina, Ohio, that was just remodeled. But, shortly before the remodel, strange stuff started happening in the archives section.”

Dean grabs his pink donut box back, his arms circling to protect it. “What kind of stuff?”

“Well, mainly, they discovered all these priceless artifacts in the basement of their archival section, stuff they never knew they had. I contacted the library, pretending I was part of the Society of American Archivists interested in the appearances that they were cataloguing, and they said that it was random stuff that had no relation to each other--original editions of books, mint-condition newspapers from the 1800s, journals from famous artists and entrepreneurs...Stuff that a small-town library in Ohio has no business owning.”

“Okay, what does that have to do with us?”

“We’re looking for a library, or a few, that Metatron might have used to keep his stuff on Earth. What better place than in the dank basement of a small-town library that no one knows about? They haven’t had it collected yet to be catalogued by the Society, so I thought that I would check it out.”

“You think that it might have Cas’s grace?” Dean asks around a mouthful of donut.

“Well, maybe. The crops around Medina have been extremely fruitful this year.”

Dean places his hands on the table and launches to his feet. “Well, worth a shot. I’ll tell Cas you and I are goin’ on a regular hunt, he can stay here and do some research, and we shove off today.”

Sam begins stuttering, “Actually, um, I was thinking… that I’d go alone.”

Dean barks out a laugh, pouring the dregs of his cold coffee into the sink. “Sure, Sammy. Go to a creepy library with creepy old things owned by a creepy loony guy currently controlling Heaven and possibly run into homicidal and pissed off fallen angels. Good joke.” 

“Dean…” Sam shoots a look at the doorway of the kitchen. “Dean, Cas isn’t doing so good. I don’t think he should be left alone.”

“Cas is fine,” Dean decides, closing the pink box and tossing it into an empty cupboard.

“You really don’t see it? He’s been struggling since he got back.”

“Yeah, no shit Sammy, he was homeless for five months.”

“I don’t think he was. Well, maybe for a little while. But I think something more happened. There has to be a reason why he doesn’t want his grace so much all of a sudden. When we found him after that reaper, he was ready to help us get Metatron and find his grace again.”

Leaning against the counter, Dean crosses his arms defensively across his chest. “Yeah, he was, until I kicked him out on his ass into the wide, open world with nothing to his name.”

“Dean,” Sam admonishes. “You didn’t have a choice. Gadreel--”

“I had a choice. And I wouldn’t change it, Sammy, because it saved your life. But I don’t think it helped Cas gain a cheery disposition toward mortal life or anything.”

“You think he’s depressed because you kicked him out?”

“He ain’t depressed.” Dean turns toward the sink, roughly scrubbing his used mug with a dirty sponge, wishing to end the conversation. “He’ll come around. We’ll get his grace back, and everything will be fine.”

Sam nods absently. He stares down at the crumbs of donut on his keyboard. He knows that his brother is evading the issue rather than ignorant to the fact that there’s an issue at all. Doesn’t make it less frustrating. “I’m still going alone,” he tries again.

It takes five minutes of throwing arguments back and forth like an angry tennis match, but Dean caves. It helps that Sam had found another hunt for them a half an hour earlier, one that seemed to be connected to all the strange things they’ve been witnessing since the angels falling. 

“I still don’t like you going alone.” Dean angrily fishes a pan out of the cabinets to begin making a more substantial breakfast. “You don’t try anything heroic while you’re gone, you hear? Just go in, check out the damn library, get out.” 

“Okay, mom,” Sam grins.

“Shut up.” 

“Here, I got more info about that case. It might be demonic possession, but honestly it’s a weird one,” Sam admits. He pauses a moment to enjoy the crackling smell of bacon Dean threw onto the pan. He smiles. “We’ve come a long way from stale Cheerios and Mac and Cheese.” 

“Huh?” Dean visually clicks with what Sam means, his eyes softening marginally. “Yeah, man, you were such a bitchy ten-year-old. You always complained about that Mac and Cheese for breakfast.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Because it  _ wasn’t  _ breakfast, it was leftover dinner.” 

“Well, what did ya expect, when Dad was on his hunt for two weeks and we ran out of mon--” He pauses. Frowns down at the bacon spitting grease. Sam knows where his mind is, but he doesn’t comment. Instead, he brings the conversation back to where his brother would be more comfortable. 

Sam clears his throat to begin. “So anyway, this lady came to work, an insurance company, and kinda lost it, taking a gun and trying to shoot all her coworkers. After the police came, detained her, all of that, she comes to in the holding cell and claims that she had no memory of what she did. But in addition to being violent, she brought in this huge bucket of black ink to work and was throwing it all around the room right before the police grabbed her. And she wrote this on one of the walls.” He gestures to the laptop and Dean leans in closer, spatula in hand. 

“‘Mercy never nary’? What the hell does that mean?”

“No idea. Also, a policeman was with her the whole time in the holding cell. No smoke before she came to her senses, at least, not reported. It’s worth looking into. Especially if Crowley is up to something again.”

Dean scoffs, “Crowley is too busy with his new human feelings and Abaddon to stir up any trouble.”

“Well, it could be an Abaddon thing, then. Worth looking into either way.”

Dean nods, eyebrows knit in thought. He looks past Sam shoulder and his face changes into something much gentler. Sam knows exactly who is brother has seen even before the cheerful, “Hey, Cas.”

Cas stands in the doorway to the kitchen, rubbing his eyes with his arm. “Coffee?” he croaks. 

Dean pours him a cup, shoves it into his hand, and leads him with a hand on the small of his back to the table. 

Sam ducks behind his laptop, a small grin twisting his lips. Oh, yeah. His brother and Cas would be just fine by themselves.

 

***

**3 months earlier**

 

An angel had contacted them, giving Tareal and the other rebel fallen angels their coordinates. They claimed to have a whole group of them, twenty at least, strategizing and plotting Metatron’s demise just as Castiel’s caste was. Castiel and Tareal travelled to a house in Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, to meet them and exchange information.

There were twenty fallen angels. They were in the place they gave in their message. But their intention wasn’t to kill Metatron; it was to kill Castiel.

Tareal used a large portion of his weak grace to wing them back to the tiny Chicago apartment. The few angels that were there crowded in doorway, wide-eyed, as Castiel screamed in pain and clutched at his wound. 

No angel could heal without Heaven’s access to their grace. Tareal simply bound and stitched the wounds he could and stayed by Castiel’s side as the bleeding slowed.

It took three nights for his fever from the infection to pass. Castiel jolted awake in the middle of the night, delirious, grabbing Tareal’s arm. “Dean,” he said urgently. “Dean, I will give you coordinates to the warehouse. Meet me there. I have information. My brothers and sisters--Sam--” Tareal pushed him back into bed by his shoulders as he continued babbling. 

Tareal leaned back on the uncomfortable wooden chair that he had settled in hours ago to watch over Castiel. He frowned at Castiel’s restless form. “You know, we couldn’t figure it out. We watched you and that human, after you pulled him out of Hell. We didn’t understand.”

Castiel shuddered in reply, murmuring Dean’s name.

“How can a man be righteous if he makes an angel fall this far?” Tareal scoffed. He pulled back the hem of Castiel’s shirt to reexamine his dressed wounds. “Anyway, you’ll live through the night, friend.” He patted Castiel’s flushed cheek.

It took weeks, but Castiel healed. When he had the strength, he limped to the bathroom in the tiny apartment by himself and lifted his shirt, examining himself in the mirror. He had nothing to show for it in the end but a thick, pink and white scar against the white skin of his abdomen. Castiel stared at his tired, bruised eyes and sighed. 

“You feeling up to another trip?” Tareal had appeared in the doorway.

“No,” he replied very honestly, lowering his shirt. He avoided Tareal’s questioning gaze. “I would do better to stay back here.”

“Just because angels want you dead, doesn’t mean you shut the blinds and stay hidden forever.”

Castiel tilted his head in confusion. “That’s exactly why you stay inside and hide forever.”

“What I mean is…. there’s a bigger picture out there, Castiel. Bigger than what the angels have against you and bigger than your feelings being hurt. Heaven is broken and bleeding and it needs help.”

Sighing, staring down at his open hands, Castiel said in a rough voice, “You’re like him.”

Tareal blinked. “Who?”

He regretted admitting it, but he said it anyway as he pushed past Tareal, walking toward the entryway to put on his boots. “Dean.”

There was a moment of thick silence as Castiel toed on a boot before Tareal said, “Castiel. I know where your grace is. A few of the angels here were doing some research, found an old library in Ohio. We think it’s where Metatron stored it.” He raised an eyebrow at Castiel, who had hesitantly turned to look at him over his shoulder. “Do you want to go get it?”

Without a second thought, Castiel smiled widely. “Yes.”  

 

***

Drumming his fingers restlessly against the cracked leather of the steering wheel, Dean checks his watch impatiently. Fifteen minutes. How long does an ex-angel need to pee?

The passenger door cracks open to Dean’s irritated, “Finally!” He stares at the styrofoam cup that Cas has wordlessly placed into Dean’s hand. “What’s this for?”

“You complained of feeling tired earlier.” Cas brings his own gas station coffee to his lips, cradling it between two hands like it’s his only possession. He nods to the highway on the right of the gas station. “Don’t we have an appointment?”

Dean sighs, places the cup into its proper holder by the radio, and presses the clutch while throwing Baby into first gear. “It ain’t an appointment, Cas. We just have to get to the coroner’s office before he leaves for the day.”

“That is why we have these BFI suits today?”

“FBI. Yes.”

“Oh. FBI,” Cas repeats, as if it to make it stick, although Dean knows full well he’ll forget tomorrow. Acronyms were never high on Cas’s list to learn during his humanity education. He takes a sip of coffee, grimacing. 

Dean notices. He always notices, he knows it--he can’t help it. Ever since he returned to the bunker, Dean has been treating Cas like a clueless baby bird with a broken wing: hovering over him to make sure he eats right, drinks right, sleeps enough, enjoys the things that he is eating or drinking or sleeping on. Basically, like a freakin’ helicopter parent that Dean usually scoffs at. “Too hot?” he asks Cas.

“Bitter,” Cas explains, carefully putting the coffee next to Dean’s in the cup holder. “I like the effect it gives me, but not the taste.”

“There’s more caffeine out there besides coffee, you know. Like, tea. Maybe you’d like that. Sammy can introduce you to some of his organic black crap.”

Cas hums an agreement, reaching to turn the heat up by a notch. “I would like that. Why is Sam not accompanying us on this hunt?”

“He, uh…” Dean rubs the back of his neck, realizing he hadn’t thought of a good way to break it to Cas that they were ignoring his blatant wishes and searching for his grace. “He found a solo hunt that may explain the black stick men we were seein’ last week.”

“Those do need further exploring,” Cas agrees. “I’m afraid that they may be a call to something darker happening. I’m worried about what it might all mean.”

“Ah, Cas, not everything is doom and gloom,” Dean reassures him as he shifts gears, merging onto the open North Dakotan highway in front of them. “They were just little dudes messin’ with our heads. Haven’t seen them since, so nothing to worry about.”

“For now,” Cas muses. “You don’t have any further recollection of what you saw when it touched you?”

“Nope. Just a bunch of dark shadows and creepy tall stick dudes surrounding me.”

“You didn’t see Sam or I as we tried to reach you?”

Dean fumbles with his coffee lid. He still hasn’t told Cas about the distortion of his face that he saw when he reached for him. Little ex-angel dude’s got enough on his plate. “No, man. I got no answers. I’m just a monster magnet,” he adds with a bright smile in Cas’s direction. 

“Dean….”

“Cas, it’s okay, we’ll figure it out. Let’s just focus on this next case, all right?”

He gives Dean a narrowed glare. Dean knows this conversation is far from over, but Cas asks anyway, “What is the case we are investigating?” 

“Some weird deaths happening in Grand Forks that Sam found. First, an insurance agent shoots up her coworkers and writes this on the wall.” Dean passes him photos that Sam had found through politely hacking into the police’s database. “Then, while in jail, she comes to and says she doesn’t know what happened, acts shaken up but otherwise normal. Guard watching over her gets coffee, comes back, she’s dead. It’s a weird one so we’ll really need to do the research, so it’s too bad Sam isn’t here to do that dirty work.” He slaps Cas’s knee. “Which means you’re up, buddy.” 

“That sounds like fun,” deadpans Cas.

 

Upon arriving at the coroner’s office, Dean and Cas put on a convincing enough FBI-esque display to successfully get to look at the body. Nothing strange about it: strangulation, assumed suicide, even though her death had taken all but thirty seconds and no one remembers her having a scarf with her. 

“I’m already stumped,” Dean admits as they enter their motel room. He throws his bag roughly onto the bed. “If she hadn’t written anything on that wall after shooting everyone up, I would’ve just assumed she was a basket case.”

“It does seem to be lacking a supernatural element,” Cas says. He takes out the laptop Sam gave them for the hunt and begins punching at the keys with his two index fingers. Dean stares at him for a full minute while he struggles. He looks up at Dean helplessly. “I can’t open it,” he explains.

“Geez, Cas,” Dean grumbles, parking his butt next to him on the bed and yanking the laptop from his lap. Their knees knock together as the mattress dips from his weight. He feels Cas stiffen and hitch a breath. He tries not to notice as he punches in Sam’s passcode. “Here.” 

“Thank you, Dean.”

Dean mutters a thank you and grabs his keys off the table. “Chinese? We’re going to be up a while.” 

“Sure.” Cas glares at the screen and punches keys. The laptop beeps angrily. “Damn it.” 

“Try not to break anything.” 

Stepping into the crisp prairieland air, Dean looks down at his keys, finding the right one to open his car. He can’t wait for his wayward angel to have his grace back, then he doesn’t have to worry about the whole human shit, which he clearly is struggling with, and--

Dean stops abruptly as a figure looms in front of him. He glares at the man standing in his way. “I’m walking here, buddy.” 

The man crosses his arms, leans a hip against his Impala, a grin playing on his face. “I was hoping I’d find you here.”

On pure instinct, Dean reaches around his belt and flips his gun out of his holster, steadily holding it in front of him. “Okay, you found me. What do you want?”

“Easy, soldier. I’m not here to harm. I’m here for Castiel.”

“How does that make me think you mean no harm, pal?”

The man smiles serenely. “Because I’m Tareal. The one that gripped him tight and raised him from homeless perdition,” he winks.

**Author's Note:**

> My crippling ego always appreciates kudos and comments! ;) Thanks so much for reading.


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